Bush and Sharon Summit - Mubarek, Blair, and Abdullah Visit Bush
Date: 4/12/2004
Note from Bill:
President Bush is once again facing chaos in Iraq. As I have pointed out many times before, when President Bush and his top staff increase their pressure on Israel their problems in Iraq worsen significantly. When the Bush team backs off Israel the situation in Iraq improves.
Tomorrow night President Bush will host a news conference from the White House at 8:30 PM EDT. He will work to defuse two issues in his prime-time news conference: rising casualties in Iraq and his response in 2001 to a terrorism warning the White House had in hand before the Sept. 11 attacks.
On Wednesday morning he [Bush] will host Ariel Sharon at the White House. Bush and Sharon are scheduled to do a broadcast back to Israel from the White House residential wing, a very rare location for a public address. This is a sign that they are working together on a solution.
At 1:20 PM EDT on Wednesday, Bush and Sharon will have a press briefing at the White House.
Today, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek visited President Bush in Crawford, Texas. On Friday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is scheduled to visit the White House. On Wednesday, April 21, Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath is scheduled to meet with Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Also on April 21, Jordan's King Abdullah II will visit the White House.
I will have more on these events as they play out.
Haaretz's Aluf Benn analyzes the Bush-Sharon Summit below:
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Analysis: A summit of the weak
By Aluf Benn, Haaretz Correspondenthttp://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/414663.html
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's ninth trip to Washington and tenth meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush will center on the two leaders' appearance Wednesday on Israel's main news broadcasts.
Bush will host Sharon in the White House residential wing, and the picture that will be broadcast to the viewers - especially to the Likud members - will be that the president is with us, that America supports Sharon and his disengagement plan.
This message should also reverberate in Ramallah, Gaza, the Arab states and European capitals. There, they should see that Sharon is directing U.S. policy in the Middle East and that the superpower is falling in line with the Israeli leader's initiative. Those who tried to bypass Sharon, reinstate Yasser Arafat at the center of the stage and undermine the legitimacy of the separation fence and the actions of the Israel Defense Forces in the territories have smashed into the wall of the American veto in the UN Security Council and U.S. support for the prime minister.
The problem is that since the last meetings between Sharon and Bush, last summer, the two have sunk to a political nadir. Bush is no longer the big winner of the "mission accomplished" in the Iraq war; he is no longer the maker of new order in the region. His army is stuck in the Iraqi quagmire and he is falling behind in the polls for the November elections. He will have to work hard to beat his Democrat rival John Kerry and win a second term in office.
Sharon is haunted by the shadow of police investigations and the looming decision of the attorney general whether to indict him. His chances in the polls are plummeting too, and his public credibility is at a low.
Thus, Bush and Sharon will be meeting in a summit of the weak, intended to help them a little and to demonstrate an achievement. Sharon took the initiative - and considerable political risk - in his announcement of his plan to evacuate the settlements in the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria. A public commitment to the American president will make it harder for him to retract his plan in the future.
Bush is hungry for some kind of achievement in the Middle East, to soften the reports of the faltering military operations in Iraq and the faulty preparation of his administration prior to the September 11 attacks.
An Israeli promise to evacuate settlements will show all Bush's critics - at home, in Europe and in Arab capitals - that the war in Iraq managed, after all, to shake the old, fossilized order in the Middle East. If Sharon, father of the settlements, is now going to evacuate them, perhaps there is also hope for Bush's democracy in the Arab world. This will be the answer to the routine argument against Bush - that he left the Israelis and Palestinians alone to kill one another.
The exchange of letters between Bush and Sharon reflects a compromise between their writers' conflicting goals. Sharon is willing to withdraw, to eternalize "a unilateral interim agreement" in the territories and deprive Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and the Tunis-Oslo bunch the rest of its status as political partners. As far as Sharon is concerned, the Palestinians can forget about an independent state and about most of the West Bank territories and Jerusalem for a long time to come.
America has other priorities. It wants to keep, at least on paper, the yet unrealized vision of the road map and Palestinian statehood, and to make sure that the planned evacuation does not block the way to its future implementation. This is why they demanded an undertaking from Sharon that the disengagement would be part of Bush's vision and the road map. These words have little practical significance. In real life, the Americans are following Sharon's cue. Even when they tried to restrain him, they gave him generous space. The last taboo was on assassinating Arafat, and Sharon is trying to shake that off as well. The separation fence route, which aroused many diplomatic problems, won de-facto American agreement after minor changes were effected.
The main threat to Sharon's plan comes not from the Americans, even if they elect a new president, and not even from the Likud. The danger is that the Palestinians will try to repeat their achievement in Gaza and drive Israel by force out of the West Bank as well. Perhaps to thwart this, Sharon resumed his threats on Arafat. But his real challenge will be to maintain security and prevent a renewed outburst of terror, which the letter from Bush will not be able to thwart.